Valuing Elders at Parliament and Gerrard in Downtown Toronto

The Storyteller’s Group meets at the Yonge Street Mission site
called the Christian Community Centre at Parliament and Gerrard, where
some of Toronto’s economically poorest and richest come together.

The Storyteller’s Group meets on Thursday afternoons. The group
is advertised as a place to “learn to tell stories that make people
want to listen” and is for seniors and adults over forty-years
old. Many of those who attend the group meet first at the Seniors’ Community
Lunch and have the option of attending the storytelling group, a sewing
group or a drop in after lunch.

The motivation for starting the storytelling group came from its funder.
Gwen Harvey is the administrator of her parent’s foundation. She
learned about a group from New York called Elder Share the Arts.

Founded in 1979, …ESTA's central strategy is bringing together
young people and the elderly using the medium of the visual and dramatic
arts. Storytelling, with a focus on oral history and intergenerational
communication, is a key focus. Exhibitions celebrating the work of older
artists and in-school programmes that feature interaction between young
people and older adults are also central.

Harvey decided to start a group for seniors here in Toronto. She was
particularly interested in a group for participants to work on personal
stories. She wanted the group to be a place for people to work on the
skills of telling stories effectively and a place where a sense of wellness
was fostered and nurtured. She felt that the group would break the isolation
experienced by some seniors and that people would see that their stories
are valued in the community. She is looking to recapture the sense of
older as elder.

Harvey approached the YSM and the YSM approached Storytellers
School of Toronto (www.storytellingtoronto.org)
with a request for proposals; six were submitted and the one from Bruce
Carmody, the former president of the STS, was chosen.. Carmody attended
one of the lunches at the YSM and told some stories to introduce the
idea and invite people to the group. The group was also advertised throughout
the YSM and at the library.

Most of the people who come to the group are from the YSM. People have
a variety of reasons for attending: some come because they have
always been nervous talking in front of other people and want to work
on that, some come because this was the most attractive option and others
come because they cannot sew. Some of the participants were worried about
joining the group because they equate storytelling with gossip.

The storytelling group meets in a small chapel and the storytellers
are surrounded by rich wood, stained glass and a panoramic view of Parliament
Street. The day I attended the group there were eight participants plus
Carmody; four women and four men.

One of the challenges of working with this group is that different people
are able to come each week. Carmody has to balance making the sessions
progressive for regular attendees and accessible and interesting to new
participants or participants who may have been absent due to illness,
family responsibilities or other events.

After greetings, introductions and an explanation of why I was there,
Carmody started by asking, “Did you tell any stories this week?” It
seemed that no one had, but after giving some examples of what telling
a story might look like, some people found that they had.

Carmody then showed the participants a diggerydoo that he had been given
upon retiring from STS. He told them that he had been given the diggerydoo
to use as a talking stick and explained how talking sticks are used by
storytellers: whoever is speaking holds the stick until they are
finished and then they pass the stick to the next speaker.

Carmody talked about how the decoration on the stick was like a story.
The decoration showed a thread from beginning to end but not a straight
line. Participants looked at the decoration and thought that it represented
a life path. They related how particular patterns represented specific
times in their lives. Some thought that the sparseness of the pattern
at each end and the denseness in the middle represented the fact that
our lives are full of activity and responsibility in middle age and less
complicated when we are young and when we are old.

This led to the recounting of some journeys they had taken. All of the
women and one man had grown up in the Caribbean and moved to Canada as
adults. Some of them spoke of the feelings of isolation and fear when
they first came here leaving friends and family, including children,
at home. They spoke of how difficult it was to find work and respectful
employers, how difficult it was to gain status as landed immigrants and
then citizenship, and how difficult it was to get used to the weather
and the community they found here in Toronto.

After this discussion, Carmody asked everybody to think of things in
their homes that they consider to be treasures. He gave everybody a notebook
and pencil and asked them to write the list. One man said that he could
not write it and Carmody told him that was okay and he should think about
his list. It was not clear whether it was the writing or the task itself
that this participant was struggling with. When it came time to share,
he did not. Carmody said later that this was the first time this man
had attended the group.

The participants were asked to talk about one treasure. Some people
spoke about a photograph of a family member they do not see often, usually
a child or grandchild. Some people spoke of a household item - a jug,
a china ornament, an afghan - that had value because of the connection
to the person who had given it to them. One man told us about an art
project, his very first stained glass sculpture.

We, the listeners, could see the seeds of stories as each one talked
about their treasures.

The last activity of the session was for Carmody to tell the participants
a traditional story. After listening, the group discussed the content
and structure of the story and how they might apply this structure to
their own stories.

Carmody likes to include a traditional tale in each session. Traditional
tales are well-honed and provide models for how to develop new stories.
He tries to find stories where the wisdom of elders is the key to solving
problems and dilemmas posed in the stories.

Carmody speaks about how the telling of stories works to unlock memories
and the relationship between oral story telling and literacy.

For seniors, the value of telling stories lies in seeing their experience
and knowledge as something valuable and worth passing on. Storytelling
helps people see themselves as elders – the keepers and teachers
of a history and culture that is as important to the present as it was
in the past. The storytelling group can reactivate the learner in some
seniors as they learn techniques of storytelling. As they explore, not
just how to tell their own story, but how to find themselves in other
stories, some develop a deeper sense of connection and community.

For children, listening to stories gets them excited about stories in
general; often after listening to a story about Anansi or another folktale,
children are full of questions about how they can find more stories like
that one and are eager to get to the library. This is another reason
that Carmody would like The Storyteller’s Group to work on some
traditional tales. He would like them to work with children from neighbourhood
schools. The personal stories may not have the same resonance for children
nor the connection to books they can find in the library.

Carmody sees an opportunity for these two groups to come together. If
seniors can move into the community and perform stories for children,
they will see themselves as teachers as well as learners and as important
to the development and growth of their community. Children will learn
to value the contributions of seniors, see through the stereotypes associated
with aging and get excited about stories and reading.

He would like to develop a library of tellable tales for the seniors.
He feels that performance is part of storytelling and that if the group
sticks exclusively to telling personal tales, the public performance
piece may be difficult for people who are not comfortable speaking about
their own lives in front of strangers.

He would like funding to develop this library and to support seniors
telling stories to children in the community. This would include making
videos and CDs of the seniors telling stories. The group has already
begun this work: they have recorded a CD that they have presented
to the YSM; they have adapted a story and done a public performance of
it for children; and they have made a video on DVD that they hope to
use as the basis of a documentary about the group and the process of
how they develop their stories. They plan to approach Ryerson to see
if a student there would be interested in working with them on the documentary.